I have a project that I'm working on, but I'm a little overwhelmed by editing: it's a Skillshare class about how to mend a t-shirt with embroidery! To keep myself motivated to work through classes, I like to report what I'm doing on each step in the project as I go, so I'm not done yet! I just started.

CREATIVE BRIEF

PURPOSE: To get my audience to take my class, and to get them to take the fate of their favorite tattered t-shirt into their own hands and FIX it!

TONE: For this video, I want the audience to feel overwhelmed by the task at first, but to calm down and feel inspired to take action at the end.

STORY:

Beginning: We have tattered t-shirts and we don't want to get rid of them, and we also have a ton of tools to maybe fix them.
Middle: We learn a little bit about what visible mending is, and my approach to it.
End: We decide to mend our own clothes.

MORE LIMITATIONS:

Length: 3-5 min (I know intro videos are generally supposed to be like 2 min, but I'm not confident I can get all this across in only 2 min)
Audience: 30-40 y/o people who like to dabble in crafting and have some energy and time limitations
Platform: Here on Skillshare
Personal: I am non-verbal and do not speak with my mouth. I use ASL, text, and a speech synthesizer to communicate - yet Skillshare requires there to be audio and likely auditory narration (they did not give clear answers when I asked about that).

TIDYING FILES

I love the way you have your files tidied! It's so easy to understand and navigate, so I modeled my files the same way to see if it helps me. Just a few files for this project. One on top is for the project files, and then at the bottom of the whole thing are the completed exported files because it seems right to have my thing I'm working on at the top and the things I've finished at the bottom. Then I've got just some simple files for video, audio, and stills (the same way project files in Vegas Pro are organized when you import them - which is what I use).

It was so easy to just go through all my files and quickly decide which ones contained clips I wanted for this video and import them into Vegas Pro without feeling overwhelmed! :D

REVIEWING FOOTAGE

With everything nice and tidy in my timeline, I am finding reviewing the footage to be a lot easier - also since I have my brief it's easy to see when a clip I really like won't cut it for what I'm doing in THIS video. But there's a lot of footage I think I want to cut into little ASMR videos for my YouTube channel.

ASSEMBLING

Visible Mending Class Intro Video - image 1 - student project

This part is a bit overwhelming, but I'm getting through it. I'm sorting out clips on different tracks, and I'm trying to get them in the right order and then cutting them down into just the slivers that work perfectly from each shot. My original footage was about 3 hours long. I've narrowed that to 30 min of the best shots. So now I'm trying to cut the best shots down to the best slivers. I also skimmed my audio which was just ambient noise from the demo shots and grabbed little sound bites I liked the best. I'm a huge fan of lo-fi music and I thought it would be fun to sprinkle my own ambient sound clips into whatever music I use, so I set my favorite ones aside for later.

Update 6/26: I assembled my video into under 6 min! And I have some ideas that will trim it down further, but I'm going to resume the lessons to learn how to refine this further and implement some of these ideas.

INITIAL EDIT

Struggling a little bit with editing and justifying my editing decisions. I think I've made a few decent editing decisions, but some of it is more challenging and since I have a deadline, I'm finding myself defaulting to a crossfade whenever I can't think of a way to justify any other edit between clips.

When I come to a logical topic change in my presentation, I do a fade out and fade in onto the next bit. With changing visuals WITHIN a topic, I do like having a fade out but no fade in on the next clip just because the sudden jump to a new clip hurts my head sometimes and I keep trying to tweak it until it doesn't hurt, but it just always hurts. I don't know how people do video essays with all these constantly changing visual aids without hurting their audience's head because I try to edit in my visual aids and it just hurts whenever it flips to the next visual aid clip. I might need to pay closer attention to edits in my favorite Skillshare classes and video essayists and study what the heck they're doing to make it work.

ONE THING I'm finding interesting is using the prosody of my signing in a similar way of using the zero point in audio clips, and it actually makes the jumps between my clips pretty smooth. And anything that doesn't quite match up well can be made smoother if I cut it where it matches the closest and give it like a 0.2-0.4 second crossfade. You can see the jump, but it's less jarring this way.

AUDIO EDIT

Visible Mending Class Intro Video - image 2 - student project

So I'm finding audio mixing a lot easier than I thought it would be, and it's improved my audio immensely! I don't speak with my mouth, so I use a voice synthesizer and sometimes the way it pronounces something sounds jarring. So I used the fade in/out thing RIGHT when I start speaking so that it sounds more natural and also during pauses. I'm also finding that in areas where the synthesized pronunciation is super jarring, I can decrease the volume slightly to smooth it out a bit.

I also picked some music, and I'm a bit more scared of dealing with music in this though, since I'm hard of hearing I'm worried I'll end up making edits that sound fine to me but will be subtly jarring to hearing people. But also, hearing people get uncomfortable without background sounds in primarily visual videos, so I need at least ambient music. I sometimes leave out sound entirely from my YouTube videos to purposely jar hearing audiences a bit, but I don't want to do that in instructional Skillshare videos lol.

Update 7/1: I'm really liking my edit now so far. I've got some sound effects to supplement my thing, and they're really subtle but really add to it. Like I can't even tell they're there unless I mute the sound effects track and listen to it without the effects, and the result is that it seems flat and wrong, and when I turn the track back on, it feels more full.

I like my music choice, but I also am aware that as an autistic person, my interpretation may be different than others. And learning how to adjust the audio is helping a LOT because it's helping my voice synthesizer to sound less jarring. I may not be able to modulate my voice tone, but with the magic of editing, I can make it sound natural (in the same sense that certain ways of dying your hair purple seems natural even though you know purple isn't a possible natural hair color).

FINAL EDITS

I wasn't sure about some of the video edits I made, but once we got to the "look" section, I started feeling really satisfied with it. Once it was all together and starting to look like what I really wanted, all the little tweaks and stuff were really easy to do (although they took some time to finish). There are a few things in this class that I don't quite understand how to implement, but I'm finding as I practice the skills, when I run into something I need that I previously didn't understand, I go back and can understand it better now that I have a situation that needs that skill in practice.

I can recognize that my video isn't super professional looking, but I'm new to this and I can see my skills improving. So, I'm happy with it.

Library of Lily Lol

Sewist, Librarian, Professional Learner

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